


Following the Footsteps Of A Rag Doll Dance- We Are Entranced!

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Biphobia, Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, generally disturbing, parental abandonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 15:10:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2777723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's always been a mama's girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Following the Footsteps Of A Rag Doll Dance- We Are Entranced!

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of unpleasant things happen in this story, so take care, Dear Reader.  
> The title comes from the Siouxsie and Banshees' song, Spellbound. I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

“Liza- are you named after Minnelli?”  
“Who's that?” she asks, smiling. There's a certain kind of man that likes it when you don't know something; it gives them something to teach you.  
“You really don't know?”  
“No,” she shakes her head, “Who is she?”  
Falcone smiles back. “I'll have to play you some records.”  
She lets her smile slip open, like a door that never closes all the way. “I'd like that.” She ducks her head. “I don't listen to a lot of modern music.”  
“You don't know what you're missing.”  
“Well, you'll have to show me.”

Of course she knows who Liza Minnelli is. That was who her mother named her for. She has a brother, Joel, and a sister, Bernadette, and she still knows all of the words to every song in Cabaret. And Chicago. And Into the Woods. She was her mother's first child, named after her favorite singer. It was just luck, of course- if she'd been born later, she might have been Bernadette- but her name feels like proof that she's her mother's most beloved.  
Liza grows up wild, the way only the truly beloved can. By the time she's fourteen, she's been made to leave one school, for fighting. On her first day at her new school, her mother smooths her hair, tells her that she has to learn to pretend to be a little less herself. “Play the game. And don't let everything hurt you so much.”  
When she's suspended for smoking on school grounds, her mother just sighs, “Try to wait until after school.”  
When her mother catches her with a boy, she tuts, “You're lucky it was me who saw you, and not your father.”  
Liza grows up believing that love is elastic; that it can be stretched to the end of the world, and snap back.  
She's sixteen when her mother finds the notes she wrote to a friend, saying- she can't even remember anymore. All she remembers is her mother crying, moaning that she doesn't know what she did wrong, and how could Liza do this to her, and was it because she had to work and she didn't spend enough time at home?  
“No, Mom,” Liza says and rolls her eyes, “I just like girls.”  
“Are you a lesbian?” her mother sniffs.  
“No. I like boys, too. I like both. Why does it matter?”  
Almost the second she's out of the house, she realizes that all she had to do was lie. All she had to do was pretend to be sorry, to act like what she'd done was wrong, and she would have been forgiven. It was so stupid.  
She sneaks into the school, and spends the weekend in the girls' locker room. It's not so bad. At least she can take a hot shower whenever she wants. There's no way this will be permanent; her mother will come looking for her, and she'll be forgiven, and this will all be nothing but a funny story to tell at the holidays. Maybe not this Christmas, though, but the next. All she has to do is wait.  
On Monday morning, she's across the street from the school, smoking a cigarette when a friend of hers comes over to bum one.  
“I got thrown out of my house,” she tells her friend. She's practicing her delivery, to get it right when she has a larger audience.  
“Dude. Why?”  
“My mom found out I'm bi.”  
“But she seems so cool. She likes musicals and shit, doesn't she?”  
Liza frowns. Maybe it's different when it's your own kid.  
“Where have you been staying?”  
“The girls' locker room.”  
Her friend shakes her head. “If they catch you in there, they'll send you to juvie. Let me call my mom...”  
The family takes pity on Liza, and she's allowed to live in their basement until after graduation. Though, Liza doesn't actually graduate. She was never much of a student, and things get so hard, all of a sudden. It's like she wakes up one morning, having forgotten everything she once knew. Some days, she feels like she can barely talk. When she comes home in the afternoon, she goes to the basement and sleeps until dinner. Sometimes, she misses dinner; she doesn't wake up until everyone else is asleep. In the dark, she'll steal up the stairs, into the kitchen, pretending that she's a robber- or a ghost. She's the ghost of someone long-dead, and nothing can harm her anymore.  
Later, she'll wonder what would have happened if she had graduated; if she'd gone to college, or gotten a job. “We need to talk about your friend,” she hears the mother hiss one morning in the summer, while the family is having breakfast. She crouches down next to the closed door, and listens.  
“She's a nice girl, but she's going nowhere. I don't want you to end up like her.”  
Nobody says anything to Liza, but when she goes out that afternoon, she meets a man at a cafe, and a week later, she's moved in with him.  
It's like magic. She goes in, ostensibly looking for a job, but really, just to say that she went out looking for a job when she returns to the house. She orders a double espresso and a piece of cake, and sits down. There's a big screen TV, showing a map of the country- it's something about sports- and she's looking at the cities marked on the map, thinking about where she would go if she could, when the waiter comes over with her order.  
“Is your team winning?”  
She blinks. “Oh. No. I just like maps.”  
He puts down her cake and coffee, and then puts himself down, into the seat opposite her. His name is Mike. He's twenty- five. He's pleasingly tall, thin as a rail, and has a completely forgettable face. His only distinguishing features are a tattoo of a big letter 'A' on his left arm- she'll never learn what it actually means- and the empty space in the trailer he shares with his mother. Just enough space for someone small like Liza.  
She fits in fine. His mother works all night, and sleeps all day, so all Liza ever sees of her is a pale sliver- graying blonde hair and a white uniform shirt- tucked into the corner where the two edges of the kitchen counter meet, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.  
“Are you Layla?” she asks when Liza meets her for the first time.  
“Liza,” says Liza, and offers her hand.  
“I thought it was 'Layla',” Mike's mother murmurs, and turns back to her coffee.  
Layla is the ex-girlfriend, who did something too heinous to name. But not sufficiently heinous not to forgive. So that a month later, Liza is told that she has a week to find other accommodations. Thanks to the stuff that Mike always has around, she doesn't dare try to find a job, in case they piss-test her, and she can hardly go back to the basement.  
Thankfully, destiny supplies another man. There will always be another man, Liza is learning. This one is named Roberto. He's her height, wears glasses with thick black frames, and works at the bookstore where she's been spending the days since it started to get cold and she found out that the trailer has no heat. Roberto lives with his parents in a suburb just outside of Gotham. No one especially wants her there, but the house is big enough that she can be forgotten within it. When everyone's at work, she walks around, looking into the various rooms, and makes herself drinks from the supply of liquor that is abundant and frequently renovated. When Roberto comes home, she expects to be taken out- isn't that what girlfriends and boyfriends do?- but he just wants to stay in. She is, she comes to understand, like a toy. To be taken out and used when he's bored, and then to be put back in the dark when he's finished. It could be worse.  
It could also be a hell of a lot better. There's a girl that Roberto works with, Judith, and she and Liza get acquainted at the Christmas party Roberto takes her to. It's the dullest party Liza's ever been to. The men all stand together, talking about books she's heard of but never read, asking her questions she knows are meant to make her feel stupid until she gets tired, and leaves the room.  
“Do you still love me, even though I'm an ignoramus,” she laughs, throwing her arms around Roberto's neck when he comes to look for her.  
“You are an ignoramus, aren't you?” he laughs back. She knocks his arm, making him spill his drink, and then apologizes profusely.  
“I'll get you another one, honey,” she says sweetly. Instead, she finds Judith.  
“Are you as bored as I am?” Liza asks.  
“I have to see these people everyday- what do you think?”  
And that's when Liza decides that she really likes Judith. “Want to have some fun?”  
“God, yes.”  
When Judith's boyfriend stumbles upon them, he says nothing, just unzips his pants and jerks off as he watches.  
“She's fun,” he says later, kissing Judith's neck in a way that makes Liza narrow her eyes and fold her arms over her chest. She frowns, shakes herself out; she's not acting like she's very much fun.  
“You should let me come live with you,” Liza teases, “You could see how much fun I really am.”  
“When can you move in?” the boyfriend laughs.  
And Liza's young and drunk enough to think that he's not kidding.  
But of course, he is. She'll spend the next few months kicking herself for that. The embarrassment never really goes away; it just fades into something she can live with and use when she needs to. Needs to make herself seem humble, to apologize.  
Which she'll do the next day when Roberto finds out about her and Judith.  
“It's just-” Liza says, trying to work up some tears, “I don't feel like I belong. You and your friends are so smart,” saying the word hurts, in a way that tells her that this is only half acting, “and I don't feel like I belong with you.”  
“That's because you don't.”  
She pushes him, and he grins at her. “Ooh, tough girl,” he says, “are you gonna beat up the whole world?”  
Then, she really does cry, because she fucked up again, and she doesn't know how to stop fucking up, how to be less herself. This is, it seems, who she truly is: she's never more herself than in the motion of her mistakes.  
“Give me Nathan's phone number,” she demands. Nathan is a friend of Roberto's who was kind to her once. “I want to talk to someone nice.”  
Roberto shakes his head. “He's not going to want anything to do with you. He's religious.”  
“Fine. Give me Nick's.” Nick is another nice friend of Roberto's. For such an asshole, he sure knows a lot of nice men.  
Roberto sighs, and gives her his number. She spends the evening smoking on the terrace, telling Nick, who is ten years her senior, and as understanding as she'd always thought a father should be, her tale of woe. “I could get a job...” she offers, and trails off.  
“Don't worry about that.”  
Once again, destiny has supplied her with another man. This one buys her things and takes her to bars, in which she's still too young to legally drink. In exchange for his good will, she does all kinds of little domestic things.  
Over time, Nick wants to go out less and less. It only makes her want to go out more. She's nineteen years old- why is she living like a housewife? With a man she knows she could marry- if the whole idea of marriage didn't seem so much like death. This keeps happening. Are all men like this? Why do they like being at home so much? The entire world is theirs, and all they want to do is hide from it.  
That's when Mike calls her. Layla has committed another unforgivable sin, and anyway, he's playing bass in a band, now, and does Liza want to come see them play at- some club in downtown Gotham she's never heard of?  
“Hell, yes,” she says. When Nick gets home, she tells him that they're going out, and he grumbles, “That's all you ever want to do.”  
“Instead of making you your dinner and then going to bed- yeah, of course.”  
“You need to find someone else to take you,” he says.  
She calls everyone she knows, but no one's interested. A feeling of liquid dread suffuses her, and she feels like she might weep. All of her friends are her age, but suddenly, as though from one day to the next, they all got married, had children- became little adults- stopped living. Is this what people do? Is this what ultimately awaits her?  
Her throat tight and her eyes hot, she calls Mike, tells him that she can't find anyone to go with her.  
“Just take a cab. I'll pay for it.”  
He must be feeling shitty about the way they parted. She doesn't question it. Because she doesn't actually care. She gets dressed up, and calls a cab. It's five o'clock when she leaves, the ride into Gotham will take a couple of hours, and Nick is playing a video game. If he notices her leaving, he doesn't say anything. It hurts, being ignored. Even by someone you don't care about.  
But the second she gets into the cab, her mood lifts. She's going to Gotham. The city is huge, and she's never seen this part before. Whatever she imagined is crushed by the reality. The streets are as wide as oceans, lined by immense buildings, beasts of glass and steel; Gothic exoskeletons of stone kissing the sky with lacy turrets. The night is thick, rich black, screaming with watery neon lights. She hasn't had anything, but she already feels drunk. She rolls down the window, and sticks out her head until the driver yells at her. At the club, there's a line around the building, but Nick put her on a list.  
She's admitted, into this hot kiss of smoke and music and multi-hued light. A girl in little more than lingerie takes her coat. This is how it always should have been. Men buy her drinks- fight over the opportunity to buy her drinks- and light her cigarettes, and dance with her. These are real men, in suits and everything, with money, and big cars, she's sure, and houses. And maybe wives. But that's never bothered her.  
The band comes on, and plays their set. It's not the kind of music she likes, but that doesn't matter. She's looking at the crowd, and it doesn't even occur to her to get bored. All of the men are so neat and dark, like pieces ripped from the night sky. And the women glitter, with sequins, and with jewels, and with just existing.  
The most beautiful woman Liza's ever seen is sitting in a booth by the stage. What it is that makes her so gorgeous, Liza doesn't know. She's pretty, sure, but her beauty isn't connected to anything that Liza can behold. Not her luminous skin. Not her perfectly-styled hair. Not her deep, her fathomless eyes. Not her body, tight curves poured into a flawless dress. Liza's enthralled. And terrified. She can't remember ever being so afraid. But why? What's some stranger in a club going to do to her?  
“Who's that?” she asks Mike, later.  
“Are you drunk?”  
“Yes.”  
“Okay- I mean, are you from this planet? That's Fish Mooney. She owns this place.”  
“Wow,” Liza giggles.  
“Shit. You are drunk. I'm taking you home.”  
“Oh, no,” she protests feebly, but she lets Mike lead her out of the club. “Can we come back?”  
“Maybe,” he muses, “The crowd seemed to like us. Though, if they didn't, we'd already be dead.”  
“The music business is tough, huh?”  
“Something like that.”

At some point, she learned how to leave her body. Not really- not, like, in ghost stories. But enough so that nothing hurts, or scares her. So, she only vaguely feels herself kicking and punching this girl she's never met before- this pretty girl, who could be someone she knew from school, or made out with at a party- until the girl doesn't get up.  
“Seduce me,” said Fish Mooney. Seduction is a promise. One that's always going to be broken, because the things that you offer, no human being could ever deliver. People want to live forever- that's why there's love. And fucking. Liza looked at Fish with her twenty-year-old eyes and promised her the energy and the stupidity of youth.  
They talk about deals with the devil. Something about how when you dance with the devil, you stay until the song's over. Now, Liza knows. She asked for this dance, and now, she has to keep dancing.  
It's over quickly. The other girl will never dance again. She'll never know how it feels to be told that you're going to live forever. She doesn't have to. She's going to be twenty- or twenty-one, or twenty-two- forever.  
And Liza  
comes back to herself when she's being patched up. Her mother's gone, and her father's gone, and Joel sent back her birthday cards, and Bernadette won't answer her phone, so, they're gone. As surely as if they were dead. And Liza's dead, too. So, in a way, they're all together, in the afterlife.  
No, she doesn't want to be back, yet. She lets herself slip out again.

“Where are you living?”  
“With this guy I know.”  
“Not anymore you're not. You belong to me, now. I'm going to put you in building I own.”  
She means to say 'Okay', but instead, she says, 'Yes.' Breathes out the word like smoke.  
“Good. Are you on anything? Tell me the truth.”  
“Not really. Are you going to drug test me?”  
Fish smiles. “No. I just need you clear-headed and focused. This isn't a job you can do if you're always thinking about your next fix.”  
But Liza is. The second that Fish said 'You belong to me, now'- that was it. Suddenly, it was all alright. Liza never has to think again. She can just be like this, forever. Half-asleep, or half-dead. This woman, this wrathful goddess, has spared her, will take care of her. As long as she's useful. But that was always the deal. Whether it was Fish Mooney, or one of an endless supply of men who would always be there as long as Liza was young and pretty and easy. If you're going to sell yourself, why not sell yourself to the best? Fish Mooney is the drug in her blood, and Liza never wants her gone.  
“Yes, Mama,” Liza says, though she's already been warned against that once. This time, Fish allows it, and Liza smiles.

Of course, she knows who he is.  
And there's no time to think about leaving herself, or anything else, because he's already there, on her, on all of her. Body and soul. He's already right up in her face, and he might be shorter than her, and he might dress like an asshole, and smell like someone smashed a bottle of cologne in a sushi bar, but she knows.  
She's always been lucky with men. Somehow, she was able to stay away from the really bad ones. She still knows what they look like, though, and how to avoid them. How to placate them when you can't avoid them. How to lie to them, and run away, as fast as you can. Fish might not think much of him, but Fish either doesn't remember or never knew what it's like to be afraid of men.  
Liza can't avoid this one, though. This isn't a bus stop or a party or a bar. She can't just smile and give him a fake phone number. Tears she never felt collecting come forth, salt satin veiling her face. The realization that she's crying makes her throat ache with the promise of more tears. It's horrible. It's horrible being so close to someone who is capable of such unimaginable things, you can almost taste the ghost of pain and death on the air, like a sea breeze. She's heard the stories. About how much he likes hurting people. That's what makes the tears come, and the nausea, and the weakness in her bones. In life, you have to hurt people. You aren't supposed to like it. If you do, there's something wrong. And she might be a murderer, but she didn't want to be.  
No, of course she didn't. No. That wasn't what she wanted.  
Still, she's thinking about this, long after he's gone. She killed the other girl. At that point, she had to, because if she hadn't, it would have been her body in the river, but the awareness of this fact didn't even reach her as it was happening. She just did it, beat a stranger to death, without a conscious thought.  
Is it worse? The Penguin might not be able to control himself, he might be sick, but she's not. And she grew up scrappy- tough, people sneered, half derisively, but half admiringly- All those times Bernadette came home crying because someone had been picking on her, and Liza took care of it, because Bernadette was her baby sister. The all-but-lost memory of Joel threatening some kid, “...I'll tell my sister...” Like she was a monstrous deity to be invoked for protection. How alive it made her feel, how untouchable. Like she really was a god, an edifice of stone, burnt offerings piled before her. Nothing could hurt her, and she'd live forever. It had been easy to kill the girl- Liza still doesn't know her name. It was like dancing; you just had to let the music move you. The music had already been in Liza's head.  
Was this how she was always going to end up? Now, she's really crying. For her mother and father, and Joel, and Bernadette, and the dead girl in the river, and all the men who used her and she used right back- What was it all for? For this, to end up being used again, only not caring, because she's never really cared that much, about any of it- And she's so tired. She doesn't have to be awake anymore. Fish is awake enough for both of them, and all Liza has to do is close her eyes and dream.  
“Mommy,” she says, to no one, because no one is listening. Even the Penguin is gone. And she's alone. It's been four years, and no one is coming for her. No one is even looking.  
She goes to her bag, gets a tissue, wipes her face and blows her nose.

“Is that a real gun?” she gasps.  
Falcone's already closing the drawer, with an expression like she walked in on him with his cock out.  
“I'm sorry,” she says, “I've just never seen one before.”  
“Really?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Do you want to hold it?”  
“Would that be okay?”  
“It's not loaded,” he says, and hands it to her.  
“It's so heavy. How does it work?”  
“Well, you put in the bullets, and then, you aim it.”  
“Oh.”  
“It's a revolver, so you pull back the hammer,” he takes it and shows her, “and then, you just shoot it.”  
“Wow. That's so interesting.”  
“Not really.”  
“Well, I guess it is to me because I don't know anything about guns.”  
“A nice girl like you shouldn't.”  
“No,” she shakes her head bashfully, “It's all a little scary.”  
“Sometimes, you need to be scary.”  
“I don't think I could,” she says and smiles, then, “I'm glad you know about these things. You make me feel so safe.”  
He frowns. “Maybe I should teach you how to shoot.”  
“Really? Do you think I could?”  
“It's not that hard. You just need to practice. You're a beautiful young woman on your own. And I can't always be there to protect you.”  
“Whatever you think.”  
“Good. I'll clear some time, take you next week.”  
“I'm not going to shoot that big gun, am I?”  
“No, no. I'll get you something small. Something for those delicate little hands.” He takes her hands in his, and she flutters and giggles. It's easy to smile, then, and she does. Thinking about all of the hiding places in her apartment that even a little panty-sniffer like Oswald Cobblepot would never, ever think to look. And of how red his blood would be, splashed all over his white shirtfront. And of how small his body would be, with the blood and breath crushed from it. Smaller, even, than in life. And of how pleased Fish would be to know that her little problem had been extinguished, like a cigarette in a glass of water.  
Liza's still smiling, thinking of fairy tale queens; of cruel, beautiful, powerful women with the world to command. She can practically hear Fish's voice, imperious in incredulity, demanding proof that Cobblepot was dead. And Liza would smile, like she's smiling for Falcone, only real, and say, Yes, Mama. She'd take a knife, and she'd cut out Cobblepot's heart, his inky and briny heart, like a baby octopus, and put it in a pretty box. And then, she would kneel before Fish and present it to her: Here you are, Mama; just like you asked.


End file.
